I collect board games, comics, and retro games and consoles — mainly Nintendo. My wife collects vintage Disney books. Between the two of us, we have a lot of stuff spread across a lot of different places.
For board games, BoardGameGeek is excellent. It knows every game ever published, tracks plays, shows ratings, and has a community of millions. If you only collect board games, BGG is probably all you need.
But I also collect comics and retro hardware. And none of those have a BGG equivalent that I actually liked. So for a while I did what most collectors do: spreadsheets.
The spreadsheet problem
Spreadsheets are flexible enough to track anything. Purchase price, estimated value, condition, edition, where I bought it, whether I’ve lent it out — you can put anything in a spreadsheet.
The problem is everything else. Spreadsheets aren’t on your phone in a usable form. They don’t have images. Sharing one with someone means emailing a file back and forth. And maintaining four or five separate spreadsheets for four or five different collections means four or five separate systems to keep in sync — each one slowly rotting as life gets busy.
What I really wanted was something that felt like a proper app — fast, visual, accessible on any device — but was as flexible as a spreadsheet when it came to the fields that actually matter to me.
Building it myself
I started building Collectionizer in 2023. The core idea was simple: one place for all your collections, no matter what you collect. Each collection gets its own structure — its own fields, its own layout — but they all live under one roof.
I launched a beta in 2024, let a small group of people try it, and learned a lot. Then life got in the way, and most of 2025 went by without much progress. In 2026 I came back to it properly and have been making it production-ready.
I’m a solo developer. This is not a VC-backed startup with a growth team. It’s a tool I built because I needed it, and kept building because other people seemed to need it too.
What makes it different
There are collection apps for specific hobbies — BGG for board games, Goodreads for books, Discogs for vinyl. They’re all great at what they do. Collectionizer isn’t trying to replace them.
What it does is fill the gap for everything else. And for collectors who have more than one hobby, it means you only need one place to look.
A few things I built that most collection trackers don’t have:
- Custom fields. Track what actually matters to you: purchase price, current value, condition, edition, platform, region, date acquired, storage location, whether it’s loaned out, your personal rating. You define the structure.
- AutoFill. Add a board game and it pulls title, description, image, and year from BoardGameGeek automatically. Books pull from Open Library. Movies from OMDb. You’re not typing everything by hand.
- Shared collections. Invite someone to co-manage a collection with you — useful for a household collection, a club inventory, or anything you don’t maintain alone. Most collection apps don’t support this at all.
- Public pages. Make a collection public and it gets its own URL you can share, link to, or embed anywhere.
- Everything in one place. Board games, comics, retro consoles, vintage books — one login, one app, accessible on your phone, laptop, and desktop.
Where it is today
Collectionizer is free to use. Sign up, create a collection, and see if it works for you. No credit card, no trial period.
I’m still actively building it. There’s a long list of things I want to add — better import tools, more AutoFill sources, an embeddable widget so you can drop your collection onto your own site. If you try it and have thoughts, I’d genuinely like to hear from you.